From the doorstep of the house a narrow black staircase tunnelled its way upward, and I climbed in the darkness and the dankness to the apartment of my friends on the fifth story. I rang and stood waiting, not in vain, for the delightful shock that seldom fails you on a Roman threshold; I knew it well and I counted on it, for nothing gives you a swifter tumble into the middle ages than the Roman fashion of receiving a stranger. You stand on the landing, and you might suppose that the commonplace door would open to the sound of the bell and admit you in a moment. Not at all; there is a dead silence, as though somebody listened cautiously, and presently a shrill cry of challenge from within—“Chi è?” So it happens, and for me the house becomes on the spot a black old fortress-tower of the middle ages, myself a bully and a bravo to whom no prudent householder would open without parley; that deep dark suspicion, that ancient mistrust of the stranger at the door—it pulls me over into the pit of the Roman past, suddenly yawning at my feet. I used to wait for the cry when I knocked at a Roman door, and to wish that I could answer it and call back with the same note of the voice of history. It takes a real Roman to do so, and I chanced to hear a real young Roman do so once or twice; he answered the challenge with a masterful tone of command that he had acquired long ago, in days when he shouted and fought in the streets of Rome, a fine young figure in the train of the Savelli or the Frangipani.
Luigi’s family kept a dishevelled old maid-servant, wild of hair and eye; insanely staring and clutching the tails of her hair she ushered me through a dark entry into the family apartment. It was a bewildering place; there were plenty of rooms, freely jumbled together, but their functions were confusingly mixed. I couldn’t help knowing, for example, as I passed from one to another, that Teresa was hooking herself into her gown by a small scullery-sink in which there stood a japanned tea-pot and a cracked bedroom looking-glass. I was deposited finally in a very stuffy little parlour, smothered and stifled with a great deal of violent blue drapery and tarnished gilding. The door was closed upon me, but it didn’t cut me off from the affairs of the household. There was a rattling of tea-things in the kitchen and the voice of Teresa giving directions in an urgent whisper; and from somewhere else there came another voice, a man’s, that was new to me—a voice which uttered a fruity torrential Italian, quite beyond any apprehension of mine, though I could easily tell that it wasn’t the language of formal compliment. Before long Teresa rustled brightly into the parlour, one hand outstretched, the other searching stealthily for an end of white tape that had slipped through her hooking and wandered over the back of her skirt. She welcomed me on a high-pitched note, at the sound of which the man’s voice immediately stopped; and she drew me forth through another small room, containing an unmade bed, to an open window and a balcony that commanded a fine wide view of the city. The balcony was large enough to hold a table and two or three bedroom chairs; and there we found Berta, together with a man who offered himself politely for introduction to the new-comer.
“Mr. Daponte,” said Berta, presenting him. He was a very short thick man of forty or so, chiefly composed of a big black moustache and a pair of roving discoloured eyes; he was glossily neat, though rather doubtfully clean. He bowed, while the ladies graciously exhibited him and explained that he spoke no English. “But he understands very well,” said Berta, “and he loves to listen.” The gentleman showed his understanding by a grin and a flourish of his large dirty hands, and a remark seemed to be labouring up from within him, so that we all paused expectant. It was an English remark, but it miscarried after all. “I speak—” said Mr. Daponte; and he spoke no more, appealing mutely to the women to help him out. But the Medusa-head of the old servant appeared in the window at that moment, and she fell over the step to the balcony and landed the tea-tray with a crash on the table; and in the commotion, while Berta busied herself over the cups and plates, Teresa drew me aside and whispered archly, indicating the little gentleman, “He will be the hosband of my niece.” Berta looked round and performed a blush—she felicitously glanced, that is to say, and stirred her shoulders as though she blushed; and she gave a little push to her swain in a girlish manner, which took him by surprise and mystified him for an awkward instant; but then he nodded intelligently and responded with a playful blow. “Tea, tea!” cried Teresa, smiling largely; and we packed ourselves round the table to enjoy a plate of biscuits and a pale straw-coloured fluid which Berta poured from the japanned tea-pot.
The view from the balcony was magnificent, only you had to overlook the nearer foreground. We seemed to be swung out upon space, above the neighbouring house-roofs; and beyond and below them was a great sweep of the sunlit city, with the dome of St. Peter like a steel-grey bubble on the sky-line. But the nearer house-roofs, crowding into the foreground, made a separate picture of their own, and I found it difficult to look beyond them. There is much oriental freedom of house-top life in Rome, on fine summer evenings; you scarcely catch a glimpse of it from the street below, but on Teresa’s balcony we were well in the midst of it. Bath-sheba wasn’t actually washing herself, but she felt safe and at ease in the sanctity of the home, lifted up to the sky, and she displayed her private life to the firmament. Little gardens of flowers in pots, tea-tables like our own, groves and pergolas of intimate linen, trap-doors and hatches from which bare-headed figures, informally clad, emerged to take the evening air—it was a scene set and a drama proceeding there aloft, engaging to the eye of a stranger, and our balcony was hung like a theatre-box to face the entertainment. Close in front, just beneath us, there was a broad space of flat roof on which the householder had built an arbour, a pagoda of wire with greenery trained about it; and in the arbour sat the householder himself, a grey-headed old priest, crossing his legs, smoking his cigar and reading his newspaper; and a pair of small children scuttled and raced around him, while he placidly took his repose, and rushed shrieking to meet a young girl, who climbed from below with a basket of clothes for the line; and the priest looked up, waved his cigar and cried out a jest to the girl, who stood with her basket rested on her hip, merrily threatening the children who clutched at her skirt. The blast of a cornet came gustily from another roof-sanctuary, further off, and there a young man was perched astride upon a bench, puffing at his practice in solitude. And so on from roof to roof, and I found myself sharing all this easy domestic enjoyment of a perfect evening with rapt attention.
The voice of Teresa recalled me; for Teresa was appealing to me to confirm her, to say that she was right in telling Emilio (Emilio was Berta’s betrothed)—in telling him some nonsense, whatever it was, about the splendour of London, its size or shape, its social charm; Teresa was certain of her fact, for once she had spent a fortnight in London, and now she dwelt upon the memory. A sole fortnight—but how she had used it! She had discovered in some handbook a scheme for the exploration of all London, within and without, in fourteen days; it appears that after fourteen tours of inspection, each of them exactly designed to fit into a long summer’s day, you may be satisfied that you have left no stone of London unturned. Only to be sure you must rigidly stick to the directions of the handbook, and Teresa had to regret that they didn’t include the spectacle of Queen Victoria; which was the more to be deplored because actually she had had the chance, and yet couldn’t take it because the handbook forbade. You see she had duly taken her stand one morning, according to plan, before Buckingham Palace; and a crowd was assembled there, and a policeman had told her that the Queen was to appear in ten minutes; but ah, the handbook gave her only five for the front of Buckingham Palace, and then she must seize a certain omnibus and be off to the Tower; and she couldn’t upset the whole admirable scheme on her own responsibility, now could she?—so she hadn’t seen the Queen, and she couldn’t convince Emilio of something or other which I could certainly confirm if I would. What was it? Apparently Teresa had just been telling me; but I was so much interested in the young man with the cornet that I had missed the point.
For me the point lay rather in the surprise of our meeting together upon a roof in Rome to talk about Buckingham Palace. I met the appeal rather wildly, but Teresa was contented; Emilio perceived that she knew more of London than I did, and the two women struck up a familiar selection from their repertory, the antiphonal strain of their singular affinity to all things of England, of the English. How they adored the “dear old country,” they said—how they were drawn by that call in their blood, of which I knew. Berta too had seen London, she had spent three days with her father in a boarding-house of Bloomsbury; she had saluted and recognized her home. So lost, so transfigured were they in their Englishry that the Roman evening all about them was again forgotten, it touched them not at all. Berta begged me to remember how from Gower Street you may step round the corner into the sparkling throng of Tottenham Court Road; and “the policemen!” she cried, and “the hansom cabs!” and “Piccadilly Circus!”—Berta hadn’t much gift of description, it was enough for her to cry upon the names of her delight. Emilio’s gooseberry-tinted eyes were strained in the effort to understand our English talk; he could offer no opinion upon its subject, for all his mind was given to its translation, word by word, in his thought; but perhaps he didn’t entirely approve of the general drift, for it was not quite seemly that Berta should display an experience of the world in which he couldn’t share. She gave him no attention, however; for she was quite carried away, the mad thing, by her fond enthusiasm over our dear old country. She was a little bit cracked on the subject, her aunt had said; and her aunt leant forward and tapped her on the cheek with tender ridicule. “You silly child!” said Teresa—for it was not to be forgotten that the call of the English blood came from her side of the family, and that Berta stood at a further remove than she from the pride of their lineage. “But her father,” added Teresa, “is just as bad. He was always italianissimo, as they say here, but he loved the English freedom. The Italians do not understand our adorrable freedom.”
No, of course not. Rome, that had old genius of tyranny, lay outspread beneath and around us, bathed in the spring-sweetness of the first of May. The white-headed priest had folded his newspaper and was attending to his flower-pots, snipping and fondling his carnations; while the two children were struggling with bleating cries for the possession of a watering-can, which they busily hoisted under the old man’s direction to the row of the pots; and the girl, stretching her linen on the line, cried to them over her shoulder to be careful. The young man upon the further roof had laid aside his cornet and was singing, singing as he leant upon a parapet—a trailing measure that lingered upon clear high notes with a wonderful operatic throb and thrill. On another roof another group had assembled, lounging about a table on which a woman placed a great rush-bound flask of wine; they were a group of men, four or five of them, in dark coats and black soft hats, and they stretched their legs about the table and talked in comfort while the woman filled their glasses. I thought of Gower Street and Tottenham Court Road; but Berta’s pitch was too high for me, and I felt that I flagged and dragged upon them in their fine English flight. But what matter?—so much the more brilliantly their native patriotism soared and shone; and I couldn’t but see that it was a true passion, genuinely romantic and pure, by which they were transported above the daily dullness of the Street of the Purification, above the lifelong habit of Rome.
“I think you are not so English as we are,” cried Berta; and indeed it might seem so, as my eyes wandered away from Piccadilly Circus and followed the old priest and the children—the two children were still struggling and yelping joyously over their watering-pot. To Berta it might seem that I was no true Englishman, and I left it at that. Neither she nor Teresa was troubled with a doubt whether a true Englishman, sitting there on the balcony in the golden evening of Rome, would be found to yearn desirously to the thought of the boarding-house in Gower Street—“Invergarry” was the name of the house, Berta said; perhaps I knew it? They certainly betrayed themselves badly with their innocent outcries. I wished that we might have had Cooksey or Deering on the balcony with us, to teach these women the style of the truly English. My own was below the level of Cooksey’s—Berta was so far right. I ought to have shown myself more actively and resolutely Roman, I ought to have hailed the old priest with kindly patronage, I ought to have been ready to instruct Berta in the custom and usage of Roman life, leaving her to grapple as she could with the life of Bloomsbury; Cooksey would have done all this, the good English Cooksey, true offspring of the diocese of Bath and Wells—“bien trairoit au linage,” as they say in the old poems. The better you favour and hold to your lineage, if it is English, the more complacently you flout it upon the soil of Rome; it is the sign. Berta, poor soul, hadn’t had the opportunity to grasp these distinctions. She had only passed three days at Invergarry, and she had learnt no more than to flourish the ecstasy of her intimacy with our dear old country. It takes more than three days, it takes a lifetime and a lineage, to teach you the true cackle of scorn, the thin unmistakable pipe of irony, which you may hear and salute upon the lips of Cooksey and of Deering. They are the sons of the dear old country, and I should recognize their accent anywhere; Berta and Teresa, if they live for ever, if they live till the reign of the next English pope, will never acquire it.
But what about Luigi? Luigi, they said, had been detained by business, but he hoped to join us before the tea-party was at an end. And presently, sure enough, Luigi appeared on the balcony with his conquering smile; and my first thought was to study his accent, which differed from that of his women and which indeed, truth to say, was considerably more genuine than theirs. It was not a pretty accent, as I have said; it was exceedingly low; but his slurred and flattened mumble, with its bad vowels and vulgar stresses, brought the pavement of London much nearer to me than the lyrical coloratura of his sister and his aunt. Luigi had only to open his mouth, only to say “Ah believe you” and “A give yer mah word,” to throw something like a fog of the Thames-side over the fair southern evening; which should have pleased the ladies, only they weren’t aware of it. Through Luigi’s talk I dimly peered into the depths of the cosmopolitan jumble of Rome; and I saw a company of Englishmen, young blades of commerce, spirited young clurks in enterprising young houses of business, established upon the sacred hills in the hope (the vain hope, Luigi assured me) that Rome would awake from her stuffy old dreams, blinking and rubbing her eyes, to hustle out into the world of modernity. Sanguine souls, they thought the sleepy old place might yet be roused to bestir herself; but Luigi told them plainly that they didn’t know Rome if they had any idea of that kind. He knew Rome—a dead place, dead and rotten and done for; it passed him why anybody who wished to do well for himself should come to Rome. They did come, however, quite a number of them; and Luigi frequented their society and caught their tones and sedulously practised their slang.
But in all that commercial society, you understand, there is nothing that will do a man any good; Luigi indicated the reason for this, and you will be surprised to hear that it was because these commercial chaps, clurks and agents and travellers and such, are not gentlemen—not a gentlemanly lot at all. One frequents their society because no better is at hand; and one frequents it because one can’t afford to miss any chance in a place like Rome; and perhaps one frequents it a little because a man likes an opportunity to swagger round the town with a company of dashing young strangers and to induct them into its resources of pleasure; but one doesn’t care to lay stress upon these frequentations when it happens—when it happens that something just a little bit better presents itself. I state what was in Luigi’s mind, I offer no opinion upon his judgment; Luigi, as you know, took the flattering view of my company that it was of the sort which might, if it were judiciously ensued, do a man good. But I am entitled to claim that in the end he was disappointed with me, and that the end came soon. I saw very little more of Luigi, and I believe he never discovered that “opening” at which he was prepared to jump, dropping the embarrassment of his family. Some voice of the air afterwards brought me the news that he had married the elderly widow of a Portuguese Jew, and that with her too, or perhaps rather with her late husband, he was grievously disappointed. His smile had carried him, I suppose, beyond his prudence.